My first international travel experience was at 24 years of age, in 1970. It was motorcycling inspired. It wasn’t so normal for Aussies to go gallivanting off ‘O.S.’ at that time. I knew of motorcycle racers heading away to compete, but I don’t think I knew anybody who had travelled just for the sake of travelling. This was soon to change with Qantas introducing its 747 Jumbo fleet in the coming years. It shook up the travel industry. The introduction of the Melbourne based Lonely Planet Guide also inspired many people.
Travelling to Work, Working to travel
Our aim was to be at the 1971 Isle of Man TT following a brief stop off in Southern Africa. When my wife and I unexpectedly became involved in the hotel industry in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, we took out residency, which was an interesting thing to do when your town was the focal point of the initial guerrilla insurgency. Suddenly we needed to travel in convoys with armed security. It was very strange but seemed quite normal.
A change in our personal circumstances meant we never made it to the IoM. We headed back to Oz, the idea being that we would sell up all we had (not very much) and I would go straight back to Rhodesia. It eventually took me 23 years to do a return trip. It was a very different place by then.
The Isle of Man trip I completed 47 years later when I rode my 700 Honda on a 5,000km, five-week journey from the South of Portugal to attend the Classic TT races. I’m not sure if my accounting for this trip should be in the motorcycling blog or the travel blog. Maybe I’ll be able to make it both.
As a younger lass, my Partner-in-Everything, Lisa Black, clocked up lengthy overseas trips, including kibbutzing around Israel and three months back-packing in India. Even now, after 30 years together and all the travelling we have done (lots), she still gets so excited about spending time somewhere new. “I’ve always wanted to go there,” is her usual cry. The fact is there’s almost nowhere she hasn’t ‘always’ wanted to go.
Escaping to Asia
We ran a clinic in country Victoria and often escaped to Asia for a month at a time, putting a locum in the clinic. When Lisa successfully negotiated the sale of the clinic to the locum in 1998, we did the obvious thing; headed overseas backpacking for six months.
We started with two months in China, including a jaw-dropping trip into Tibet at a time when the Chinese were starting to make their presence seriously felt. Can’t give you a report on the Terracotta Warriors or The Wall. Didn’t see them. And strangely enough now, having spent a rough total of six (or so) months in mainland China, we still haven’t seen them. Maybe one day. Over the years we’ve amassed a few years in Hong Kong but haven’t much ventured beyond Shenzhen from there.
Being on a very tight budget, this was always going to be more of a ‘people’ trip, using public transport. This included several overnight ferry trips, up the mighty Yangtze to Wuhan, before the massive earthquake in the Sichuan Province and well before it became Covidly infamous.
From Beijing we jumped on the Trans-Siberian railway for a six-day blob-out to Moscow, with a restaurant car more interested in selling clothes and plastic oddities, than serving food to foreigners. Every railway station stop saw people rushing over to the restaurant car, bargaining for stuff the staff had purchased in China. We were fortunate to have stocked up on instant noodles.
We had a brief, somewhat concerning time, in jail in Poland after we left Moscow by train, then we were sent back to Belarus where we had no visa and were also threatened with jail. Extraordinary support of locals enabled our ‘escape.’ And due to what could be best described as a case of mistaken identity, I got to have lunch at an Ultra-Orthodox rabbi’s home, participating in some unusual rituals. Stories within stories.
We had been discussing setting up a school teaching Bowen Therapy for a while. As we sat in a tea house somewhere in China, a couple of dozen locals, rubbernecking to see what card game we were playing, we decided on the name, the International School of Bowen Therapy – ISBT. The card game was Canasta, and it was part of the six-month long Travel Championship. And the decision to set up the school led us to knock on doors in Europe to drum up interest for a return visit. It worked.
Hymie sets the scene
When we started our European adventure to establish ISBT it was for three months there, then three months back in Oz. Once the Australian side of ISBT was able to operate without our presence, we moved to almost full-time in Europe, with ever-briefer trips to Australia. And it’s been over 25 years of this ‘travel experience,’ with many trips to establish courses in Asia and South America adding to our ever-evolving EU adventure.
In the early EU days we had an old camper that took us from course to course. Slowly. It was an old Hymercamp, the English pronunciation giving us Hymie. This often meant, for instance, travelling from one end of Austria to the other, via the North of Italy. We stayed in camp parks only when we needed to have access to electricity to charge computers and such. No mobile phones then. Phone calls meant a never-ending battle with phone cards that were often difficult to deal with, and public phones that matched the cards for difficulty.
Hymie had a toilet and shower, of sorts. We loved Hymie. From Italy to Norway, raging rivers, autumnal forests, soaring mountains, fiords and ancient standing stones provided us with company overnight, sometimes more.
The slightest excuse to work in a country or city that put its hand up, sometimes even a hint of putting a hand up, has allowed us to spend a brief time in lots of places and quality time in many. A lot of our travel has been out of season which has allowed us unique opportunities to get to know people and places without crowds. And if courses started, we got to spend quality time there.
During our time establishing courses in Brazil, we became involved with a German based charitable NGO that had established itself in a favella in Sao Paolo. We provided a scholarship for our course for a physiotherapist who worked with them. Sao Paolo is not one of our favorite places, but there were cheap flights midweek all over the country. The massive Iguacu falls in wet season gives real meaning to the overused word ‘awesome’. Salvador de Bahia is fascinating, and Rio, of course. And the animal paradise, The Pantanal wetlands, was a mind-boggling experience. And so much more. This happened in several countries. Trips to Atacama and Patagonia (and more) came out of a little work in Chile.
The USA hasn’t been a priority, except when we went there to interview Tom Bowen’s son for my Bowen book. Of course, there are non-work travels…such as the return to Zimbabwe and to Israel, on two occasions. Amaazing!
It could be said that travel was at least as important as our work. It was nice when they went hand in hand. The problem was, of course, it was a bloody expensive life-style as we sought to establish ISBT.
What we have seen over the last 20 years or so is the disappointing shift in attitudes to Australia and Australians. Excited, bosomie hugs from accommodation hostesses upon finding out we were ‘kangarrroo’ have given way to indifference, or worse. Or maybe it’s just that there have been soo many Aussies out there in recent years.
We’ll still be doing work related trips here and there for a while but as we slow down our school activities, our future travels, we plan, will be to former Portuguese territories and autonomous regions. At least those where it’s safe to do so. The wonderful Azores, in the middle of the Atlantic, was our first.
With Covid seemingly being ignored, travel is increasingly on people’s minds. For us, we’re not so sure at the moment. We’re preferring to take a cautious approach, but with our eye on the prize…More Travel. It will come. But not with Hymie.
It was midsummer and there was only one other customer in the camp park, despite it being next to a fiord.
led to the single lane bridge in the pic at the top of the page.
trip from Germany into France.
